On December 6, 2007, the fire department in Troup County Georgia was called to a rural county road after two bags were found on fire.
Extinguishing the blaze, firefighters find dismembered human remains inside the bags. The body had been cut into 13 pieces, and the head, hands and feet, were all missing.
Investigators failed to identify the body at the time, but did not give up.
Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack go over the evidence found in the bags and how it was used, 18-years later, to identify the woman....and open a case that leads to murder, stolen identity, and fraud.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.12 Introduction - Tedious
01:30.39 80 charges, woman accused of killing girlfriend
02:43.51 The things in life that require tedious checking of facts
03:40.38 Nicole Alston, 24, missing, replaced by Angel Thompson
06:04.36 Fire Dept called, two bags on fire, bags contain body parts
10:41.24 Head, hands, and feet are missing
13:41.24 Prevent identification of body, steal identity
19:07.67 Legs will not be mistaken for a dog
24:44.58 Determine if female has had a child
29:45.21 We don't know about murder, we know dismembered and burned
35:01.34 Investigators preserved what they found in 2007
36:18.07 Alston identified after sister entered DNA into public site
40:21.61 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Doubts with Joseph Scott More.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Some things in life are just absolutely tedious. I love that,
and I love that word. I absolutely love that word tedious.
It's such an all encompassing phrase. You know. It goes to,
you know, taking a lot of time to do something,
(00:26):
or the work that you're having to do is so
overwhelming just by sheer numbers. That boredom sets in those
sorts of things. And that happens a lot in investigations
because you've got so much data coming in that you're
trying to process it, and you're trying to, you know,
hang your proverbial, investigative and scientific hat on it. Sometimes
(00:50):
it's hard to really mold it into something. It's almost
like working with super wet clay. Today, I want to
talk about a case that is tedious for many reasons.
I think one of the elements of tedium that comes
along with this is time. Another element is confusion. And
(01:14):
I think finally this idea of tedium is demonstrated through
the fact that the perpetrator in this case has had
over eighty charges filed against her. Oh I forgot to
mention something. She killed her girlfriend and chopped her up
(01:38):
into little bits. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
bodybags now, David, I don't think I could be an
airline pilot. And this is other than the fact I've
got bad eyes and I'm listen. I will spend time.
I will literally spend time on utah on YouTube watching
(02:03):
people land and take off. I'm fascinated by it. You
know where they go into these different locations around the world.
You live through it vicariously, and these people are incredible
as far as I'm concerned, as far as technicians and
all that stuff, but it is so incredibly tedious. Everything
you have to do and check and you want them
(02:24):
to do it and check it. Trust me, as a passenger,
I do because of I don't know gravity, and so
I want that to happen. But you know, you see
what they do, and you know how that kind of
translates into into a safe landing or a successful landing.
When you have certain cases in forensics, it's kind of
(02:44):
like that, you know, what what boxes do you tick?
As the brit say what boxes do you tick? Have
you ticked all of the correct boxes? Are you paying
attention to every bit of detail? And the case we
have today it really caught my eye because it's so
involved in Oh my lord, it took so long to
come to a conclusion.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
On You know, Nicole Austin went missing in two thousand
and seven, Gone, just gone, and her mom didn't know
where she was, you know, her loved ones didn't know
where she was. But she's twenty four years old, she's
from New York City. And I was looking this over
(03:28):
because I kept trying to figure out what was really
going on. You talked about the tedious, and I thought
there was a time when I was researching this that
I went, wait a minute, Okay, we have a We
have Nicole Alston whose family knows she's gone, but nobody
else seems to know. And the reason is her girlfriend,
Angel Thompson, who was also twenty four at the time.
(03:51):
She's forty two now. Angel Thompson had been living her
life as Nicole Alston and Nicole Alston still existed on paper.
Nicole Alston was still getting food stamps, she was getting
Social Security benefits, she was getting Section eight housing, she
(04:15):
was getting a lot of stuff. Nicole Allston was so
I guess her family just thought, well, maybe she just.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Doesn't want to talk to us.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Or something.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
There wasn't a big search, you know. But in two
thousand and seven, the fire department was called in Troop County,
Georgia because there were these bags burning along a rural road.
Now I know you know Troup County, don't.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
You, Yes, I do, Hugians in particular.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, you tell me. Okay, where is that in relation
to Atlanta?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah? People think when they think Georgia, unfortunately they think
Atlanta and Atlanta is not some total of all of Georgia.
Georgia is a big place. It's one of the largest
states east of the Mississippi. Matter of fact, fun fact,
in the words of Paul Blart, fun fact, the most
(05:08):
counties of any state east of the Mississippi. As a
matter of fact, tiny county, So lots and lots of them. Anyway,
I digress. So if you go south to southwest of
Atlanta along the eighty.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Five corridor, Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Like you're heading to Montgomery out of Atlanta. That's the
area that we're talking about, and it's you know, Hogansville
is probably well Atlanta traffic. Who can measure that? Yeah,
I'd say you're probably at least an hour hour and
a half with Atlanta traffic on a cod day to
make it to Atlanta or back up around the airport.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, okay, all right, Well then that gives us an
idea of where we are. And if you continued on
eighty five, you could end up in Montgomery, Alabama.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, yeah, you could in Auburn and all those other
places in between.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Well, these bags were found on fire. Fire department comes
out there, and of course, you know, you put out
a fire with then they start looking in the bags,
you know what's going on with these bags? And well
what they found. The fire department found a chopped up body. Yeah,
but but this chopped up body was missing some important
(06:18):
parts missing, the head, the feet, the hands, all missing.
So you've got parts of a body in two bags
that are now burned. And that's it, Joe, that's it.
And in two thousand and seven, I know that when
we look back around that eighteen years ago, we had
(06:39):
we'd come a long way with DNA, we'd come along
way with forensic testing and things, but not far enough.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
No, not as far as we have today. We can
put such a fine point on things today compared to
it was literally and I can't believe I'm saying this
about two thousand and seven. It was literally a different world, right,
It truly was. From a scientific perspective, moves at light speed.
My students at Jacksonville State. When I'm lecturing to them now, Dave,
(07:07):
I'll frame things like so old, I feel like I
ought to be sitting up on a mountain with a
long gray beard and birds living in my beard. I'll
say things like you're going to behold wonders in forensic
science that I could not even begin to imagine, you know,
moving on into the future, and just like back in
(07:27):
two thousand and seven, there are things back then that
I could not have visualized now in the world that
we exist in now. And so we make leaps like
that in all high end scientific endeavor we do, or
at least I think scientists and research sciences certainly hope
that we do. But in this particular case, yeah, you
had a lot, You had a lot to go on
(07:48):
as far as a body, though it was I don't
know how it was ordered. I could use particulated uh,
and it has suffered great heat relate trauma obviously post
mortem heat related artifact. But yet, what do you literally,
I always use this phrase, what are you going to
(08:09):
hang your hat on, because if you don't have a
database to go to, all you know is that you
can probably surmise depend upon the pieces you have, you
can surmise race. If you have a dark skinned individual,
you can take a shot at that, if you have
any bony elements that are left behind. There are certain
(08:31):
elements in our skeletal structure, like once you strip all
of the tissue off of which is hard to do
with a burn case. Unlike like if you have somebody
that just goes through standard decomposition. I say standard, right,
you know there're a standardized composition, but there is there
really is. If you have a body that's just laid
out on the ground and exposed to the elements, it's
(08:51):
a lot easier to do and they become skeletonized. It's
a lot easier to do aging and that sort of
thing on that.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
But now the same problem with not problem, but with
flies and things like that in a burned and burned
remains that you would have in non burned.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Yeah that interesting. Flies can take certain things away, but
they're not necessarily going to affect a skeletal remains. Now,
which could do I think and I know that you
could even with burn cases, you can still understand the
life cycle of the insects from an entomological standpoint that
(09:27):
are showing up, you know, because they're at a predictable rate.
We talk about the life cycle of insects showing up,
so that data would still be viable. However, what could
be compromised are say, for instance, you're talking about a
victim here that is twenty four years old, if you're
missing certain elements, like you think about bone fusion, Like
(09:52):
when we hit adulthood, our bones stop growing. Well, some
people hit it earlier, some people hit it later. And
if you're missing certain elements you think about I think
they're called the epiphus ill plates that you know, kind
of fuse together and at that point you're not going
to grow anymore. So if you're missing some of those elements,
that can kind of throw you off. And here's the
other thing in the initial the initial search in this case, David,
(10:13):
they don't have a head. Now that's problematic, and it's
problematic if you're trying to identify somebody. I think probably
the most striking thing for me is the teeth, because
teeth are something that they tell such a tale about
the person in their life. Most people don't think about
what their teeth or could literally be saying. Scientifically, we
(10:34):
look for things like wear patterns on teeth, like what
side it And I do this with my students as well.
I'll say, okay, everybody, close your eyes when I teach
my odentology section, close your eyes and take a tip
of your tongue and run it across the surface of
your teeth and try to determine what side of your
mouth do you favor when you chew? Well the lines
share people, they favor the right side because there will
(10:56):
be as much wear. Now, my teeth have a lot
more wear than saying eighteen year old freshman student. But
they get an idea, you know, like the canine is
no longer sharp, it's kind of worn down. Some people
grind their teeth, but not just that. But you're thinking
about the eruption of teeth. You know, even twelve year molars.
Have they erupted? Have they not erupted? You think about
(11:18):
wisdom teeth. Are the wisdom teeth still there? Because if
the wisdom teeth are still there all right, then I
can exclude everybody else in the world that has had
their wisdom teeth extracted, and conversely you can do the
same thing. You can also learn a lot about their
(11:38):
dentition as far as how well the body has been
or not the body, but how well they took care
of themselves in life. Do you have restorations, do you
have cavitated areas in the teeth? All those sorts of
things come into place. So you're missing ahead. That's one
of the biggest elements here. And isn't it interesting, Dave
that they took the hands off? What was your thought
(12:00):
about that when you saw that? I mean, I got
to ask you what was your first first inclination there?
Speaker 1 (12:06):
My thing was why the feet?
Speaker 3 (12:08):
I get the hands, and I get ahead from an
identification standpoint, But the feet. That's what got me because
again we've done that. You know, you cut somebody's hands off,
you don't have fingerprints? Take the head off?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Well, I think I think that people do that because
they they think back to babies having their feet printed.
You know that there's a card out there somewhere that's
going to have a footprint, and can you marry that up?
You know with a print. I've never seen any kind
of empirical study that you couldn't it should be unique.
(12:38):
But I got to tell you, person, I've never been
involved with the case that involved that type of foot printing. Okay, difference.
You know when you talk about crime scene and you're
talking about, well, there are footprints that are left behind
that could be shoe prints, it could be footprints, those
sorts of things. But as far as using a print,
and I know that it's happened, somebody's out there saying, well,
(13:00):
that's so and so he's working. I've worked these cases.
We've seen hundreds of these. Okay, God bless you go
in peace. I'm glad that you have, But in my experience,
I never have. And I think, but you have to
admit that people think about the footprint that they take
of a baby when they're little, and they're thinking that's
going to be an identifiable landmark that they can go
(13:22):
back to whoever this person was that's doing this. They're thinking, Okay,
if I decapitate them and if I take their hands
and their feet, it's going to diminish, it's going to
diminish the authorities of ability to get them identified. Because
you know why, because in the back of this perpetrator's mind,
(13:42):
what they were thinking is that those hands, those feet,
in that head, they now belong to me, and I'm
going to.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
Have this identity.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Imagine yourself as a guy that's working at the local well,
I guess you could. You don't have to be volunteer,
but you could be a guy that's sitting around the
firehouse in rural Troop County, Georgia, and you get a call,
got a call out, and this is the way the
call would probably run. They might even say, we've got
a brush fire on the side of the road, and
(14:28):
maybe it did catch some stuff on fire. And you know,
for firefighters, God bless them all. I love all the
people in the fire service. I think they're genuinely the
coolest people around. They roll out. Can you imagine being
the kid that's on the hose and you're sprinting this
thing down and all of a sudden, you see this.
Here's the problem. They're not very specific about the type
(14:50):
of bag. I'm assuming, assuming you know what they say
about assuming I'm assuming that it's a plastic bag, and
you've sprints this thing down, You've knocked the fire down,
and then just out of curiosity, you know that this
is where the fire started. Do you know how they
know that, Dave, because it's very logical. It's I love
(15:10):
talking about fire and people that work in I think
arson investigators are some of the most incredible forensic scientists,
unsung forensic scientists. By the way, out there wherever there's
the most damage. So, and it makes sense, doesn't it.
Wherever the fire has been burning the longest, that's going
to be your point of origin. And you can kind
of take that to the bank relative to is it
(15:31):
a structure or out in the field. Okay, So can
you imagine being this kid that kind of knocked this
fire down and he sees this big blob in the
middle of the road, he walks over there. He might
you know, he's got his firefighter gloves on, he's got
his big boots on, and he might just bump it
with his foot or maybe peel it away, and the
next thing you know, you're looking at a hunk of
human flesh. He imagine, what's surprised that would be out
(15:54):
there in rural rural Troop County and Dave, fire, according
to what we're seeing, was started literally on.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
The side of the road. Yeah, that tells a lot
about the perpetrator here. It does and.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
When I was first going over this, trying to find
out everything I could, and one thing that has hit me,
you've me talking about your students. You realize now that
a freshman coming out out of high school and going
to for your university would have been born in two
thousand and seven, two thousand and eight. Thank you for
(16:34):
I just thought i'd throw that out there because in
my head, I was thinking this is a long time ago.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
It's a short time ago. You know.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Well, as you're teaching this to your students, you're gonna
have some going in there before.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I was born.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Listen, let me tell you this one aside. I've got
students right now that are actually thinking former students that
are actually thinking, gosh, when can I retire?
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Wow? Bless your.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Well.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
All right, let's get forward on this one, because you
do have what kind of person okay, because they have
dumped somebody because you don't kill yourself, and I guess
I was trying to think, is there a possible way
you could hack yourself up and at the last minute,
like the match, die after you you know, this is
(17:22):
an obvious.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Death.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
The very the very best thing would be mutilation, abuse
of a corpse. You would have that if you were
to find somebody you didn't know on your property and
you were trying to get rid of them kind of thing,
which is so stupid. I mean, I'm just trying to
think of any way possible.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
It does happen. I mean, we've had cases where people
have panicked and they've had a body around, and so
they've tried to get rid of the body because they
don't want to be associated with. It doesn't necessarily mean
that they kill them. However, that does in fact happen.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
And that's kind of why we're being very careful with
the story in LA with D four v.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
D Burke.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
You're absolutely right, brother, And so as we move forward
in this one, though, it actually we come at it
from the ending, because as Joe you mentioned at the
very beginning, that we have had an indictment, so we
do know what has taken place, and we know who
is accused of doing this, and we know what transpired.
So we know our victim, Nicole Austin, she was twenty
(18:21):
four years old when she was hacked up into pieces,
her head, hands and feet removed, and her remains and
I mean that literally her remains were set on fire.
We don't know where the head, the hands, and the
feet are at this moment. I don't know if we
ever will, right, I would imagine the family would like
(18:43):
to know.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
And oh yeah, you know, you.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Would think if anything good could come out of this,
that the suspect here might say something. But to go
to this, you mentioned the fire guy showing up and
you know, put out the fire first, and you go
to kick the and you see a leg an arm,
I mean, you know, the human arm. The human leg
is going to look like nothing else, you know, and
(19:09):
it's robust.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
It's robust as well. It's it's a big, big piece
of anatomy that would be really hard, really hard to
kind of disguise or hide.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
You're not going to come business with somebody's dog.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's so very distinctive. And you know,
this is the I've heard some reports that have said
a bag, and I've heard other reports that say bags.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Yeah, bags. There were two bags, okay, yeah, according to
the police report.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
And you know, I'm thinking, well, if you've got a
couple of bags and you're doing this, so you've it
would stand a reason. Since this is along a roadside,
right this this means that the person wanted to put
as much distance between themselves and this event as possible.
(20:03):
I know that seems rather obvious, but just let me
feed this lot of logic to you. Here I was considering.
So you're going to go to the trouble of you know,
dismembering a body, you bag it up. Now we know
that other pieces are missing, so the assumption would be
(20:24):
that they are dispersed. Now what I'm hearing right now
is roughly thirteen pieces, all right, that they have found,
all right, So we don't know if that's concentrically contained
to this location or it's on kind of an outlied,
outlying area. But here's the weird thing. You go to
all this trouble to do this, and then you're going
to pull over on the side of the road. You're
(20:45):
going to have to use some kind of accelerant because
as you and I have studied, you know, for low
these many years now, you know that bodies don't burn
real well, they're not great fuel. So you have to
initiate this fire. So you're going to get out of
your car at an intersection, take these pieces out, place
(21:05):
them on the side of the road. In plane view,
of anybody and everybody, douse them with an accelerant, put
fire to it, get back in your car and head out.
Why would you do that? Why not? Why not tramp
off in the woods even ten yards or twenty yards
and do this and no one would be the wiser,
particularly in the moment. I just it kind of baffles me,
(21:29):
you know when I think about think about why why
this course was taken? And still to this day, we
do know who the victim is. But Dave, I got
to tell you, because the head's missing, we don't we
don't have a cause of death. We don't have death
in this case.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
So we know we've got body parts in a couple
of bags that are lit on fire, and the fire
department is called to come and put it out. We
know it's a rural area trip Downty Georgia. Now the
base that we know, Joe, you're going to get called
out there and uh, we're going to try to figure
out what happened. And you really have to figure out
(22:10):
on top of what happened, But who is this because
that could lead you to something. And yet if you
don't have a head, hands feet, and you've got what's
left is burned. Where are you going to start with
the identification process.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
The only thing you can do, Dave, I would think,
is well, you're going to Okay, here's how it would
break down. We're going to look for anything superficial that
we can identify. You know what, you know what my
first stop would be on this torso.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Or what.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, you're right on the money there, you score man.
I'm going to look for tattoos and I am going
to see if any of them marry up with any
particular style. And I'm also going to see if there
are initials attached to this in any way, anything that
is a specific identifier. I've had a number of cases,
(23:02):
and I know people have got these kind of tattoos
that are walking around out there where they've had someone
that they dearly loved and they have their dearly departed
state of death, you know, like tattooed on their arm
and I'll say I will always love you or things
like that, And you think that that's rather innocuous, But Dave,
that's a piece of information I would not have had previously.
(23:24):
I'm not saying that happened this case, but you're going
to go over every bit of this body from stem
to stern to try to pick up on that. Here's
the problem, because you're talking about subjecting this body to
incredible heat. I think folks would say, well, would it
be possible to find a tattoo on a burned surface?
(23:44):
My answer is yes, it would be. But this gets
tedious here because you have to literally scrape and peel
through that top burned layer so that you can get
down to the dermos. Now, it all depends on how
badly the dermist layer is earned not in every case,
or you're going to see tattoos completely burned away a
(24:05):
lot of it. Well, it's all depended upon the intensity
of the fire and how long that tissue was exposed
to fire as to whether or not this thing is
going to curl up and disappear and vanish. That would
be the first place. The other place I'm going to
look over the course of the body. Now they're saying
that we have a torso. Okay, that's what's being implied
(24:26):
at least no head, no hands, no feet. But if
I have a torso and I can surmise that this
is a female, guess where I'm going. I'm going to
the plumbing. At that point in time. I'm going to
see if there's a uterus, I'm going to see if
there's ovaries. I'm going to see if there's any evidence
that this individual has given birth at some point in time,
(24:46):
and there are examinations that we can do to make
that determination. And I want to do a deep dive
relative to that because those are specific identifiers, any kind
of last augmentation on the body, breast, implants, anything like that.
And also here's the other thing talking about surgeries. You know,
(25:09):
fire is fire, but what can be resisted by fire
or stainless steel, pins, plates, surgical steel, all that stuff.
So this gets really complex. The first thing you have
to do is take the remains that you have, and
they would have done this any way in any kind
of fire death. They're going to thoroughly X ray this body,
and if there's anything on that X ray, that radiograph
(25:31):
that is radio opaque, any kind of metallic bit that's there,
it's going to stand out, and you want to target
that area. You have to be very specific because sometimes
X rays can be deceiving. Okay, because when you have
fire remains, it's amazing, Dave. You'll see pins, buttons, zippers,
(25:53):
all kinds of things will appear on the x ray
because the person might still be clothed or partially closed
clothes are not burned away. I've found zippers on the
backs of people when you shoot the X ray because
you couldn't really orient the thing, you didn't really know
what you were looking at. All kinds of things pop up.
(26:13):
We've even found spent projectiles in burned remains, and that's
something that does happen. I've found broken knife tips in
burned remains. That's why you always do an X ray first,
so that you can kind of catalog the stuff as
you're walking your way through it. But they would have
had a monumental task on their hand, and if this
(26:34):
was in Troup County, Georgia, her remains would not have
gone to the Troop County corner. They don't have a
corner that would do an autopsy. Her remains would be
transferred almost an hour and forty five minute drive over
to GBI headquarters where they have the State Medical Examiner's
office there. So you're not going to have like an
(26:55):
EMMY investigator that's out there. You might have a GBI
agent that'll show up. You'll have the corner that's there.
They're going to take a look and then they're just
going to load this into the back of the van
and they're going to take it out to GBI headquarters
and do the examination out there. Dave, I was reading
(27:23):
in an article about this case, and I got to
tell you it's I hate to hear this term, but
in the in the article. In the article, and I'll
give credit to the article, it was it was written
and it's posted on Long Crime Network website. They refer
(27:44):
to this victim, uh, to this poor woman that lost
her life, refer to her as a cash cow. When
you begin to think about what has happened with this woman,
the end that she met, isn't that it's so dehumanizing
(28:07):
to think that. It's not that the article is necessarily inaccurate,
it's just the fact that that's what this poor victim
had become, Dave yea cash Just imagine that your family
thinks that you're alive out there somewhere, but they've never
made any effort to contact you or reach out. Maybe
they had, but it's kind of sounding thin to say
(28:30):
the least. They just think that you're out there, still
existing in the ether somewhere and you're not. You've been gone,
You've been gone for decades now, you just poof vanish
and then in death you refer to as a cash cow.
How horrible is.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
That, you know the I'm glad you brought that up, Okay,
because I think far too often the world of crime
coverage today loses some of its humanity and we forget
that we're dealing with people like Okay, cash cow might
be an appropriate term if you're discussing it with others
(29:07):
in the crime world. But if you're the mother, grandmother
of the victim who didn't know, you know, what it
be out, what became of their daughter, granddaughter, you know,
to see that would be shocking, It would be upsetting
and more than anything else, you don't know. They might
have been burning a candle every night for the last
eighteen years, wondering when are we going to hear from Nicole?
(29:29):
Why have we not heard from Nicole? So all that
aside Nicole Alston was murdered. I'm gonna take that back,
because I don't know that she was murdered, Joe. I
don't know that. I do know that her body was
dismembered and burned, and what we have learned now. And
(29:49):
this is why I really get down to the DNA
of this Joe, because I can tell you after the fact. Once,
once the investigation was able, because they couldn't identify the remains,
didn't know who it was. They did not, I say
they It isn't like we found the remains on the
side of the road. We called, hey, is anybody missing?
Somebody without it? You know, they actually did a real
(30:13):
investigative dive, tried to figure out what was going on here,
and couldn't. They did not have the they didn't have
what they needed to actually identify the person. Without being
able to identify who it is, then you don't even
know where to start with the investigation. It starts with
knowing who's dead. And so they worked on it hit
(30:37):
a dead end. The case went cold. But as many
of the cases that we have worked on over the
last four hundred and ninety nine episodes or so, DNA
genetic genealogy, the forensics actually identified the remains without hands,
(31:00):
without feet, without a head. I'm thinking the hair that
was gone was there any because we had a story,
you know, we had a case the other day where
we were talking about hair three decades old hair was
an identifier, and here we don't have a head. I mean,
this is really something I'm thinking, how in the world
where do you start to identify?
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Well, the thing the cool thing about this day, if
you I'm not being disrespectfuble, I'm just saying from a
scientific standpoint one of the things that this is not
like we have a body that's been moldering in the woods, okay,
and we're down the skeletal remains and we don't know
if we're going to be able to retrieve anything. You
know that fire sometimes helps, do you know that? And
(31:44):
the reason learned that from you?
Speaker 1 (31:46):
I had no idea. I'm not kiding Joe.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
I used to think, like, we did episodes of this
where somebody lit a fire in the house to cover
up a crime.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
I thought, sounds like a great idea, you know.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
And I remember one episode we did and you it
was a long episode because I couldn't quit listening to you.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
I was like, dude, what what do.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
You mean They set the fire to get rid of everything,
and all they did was like freeze it in time.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, you really do, because okay, think of it this
way if you uh, and this is really horrible to
think about. But just to understand if you're think about
it like a well, I won't use that example that
really will put people back. But just think about something
where you have the external area is burned, okay, and
(32:32):
it's showing showing signs of being burned. We're talking about charring.
We're talking about even the skin becoming so dehydrated that
it crisp up and it's curled, that sort of thing.
I guess what the interior. The interior to a great
degree remains intact. So this is a fresh dead person day.
(32:52):
So when they go in to examine her body, one
of the things they would have done is to have
collected see how can I say this? They would have
collected deep muscle tissue that they could have gone into bone,
(33:12):
They could have they probably could have pulled out some
blood in here, because it's all still going to be
there and they're going to have this, They're going to
have this hanging in the background. Okay, so they're going
to hold onto this biological sample. Now they did know.
We did know back during that period of time that
we could hang on to things and they would have
(33:35):
future utility. Did you know that at every autopsy we
do something. It's called a blood card and there's like
a little it looks like a felt car. It's real tiny.
It's about the size of a microscopic slide. Okay. And
you take just a droplet of blood and you merely
hold the hold the dropper above it and one little
(33:59):
drop and it goes down into the circle that's right there,
and you let it dry and you have that forever
and ever, amen, and it deserves it. Yeah, So you
can do that. They can retain tissue and this sort
of thing. So the fact that this is a fresh
dead remain, that's where DNA comes into play. Remember our
little girl up in Mary Simpson Simpson, Oh yeah, in
(34:21):
New York, in New York, dude. They they they had
held onto her dress. They and they got that from
seminal seminal her. The identity of the deceit of the perpetrator.
They got his from a seminal sample off of her dress.
(34:43):
That's not robust. Over that long period of time, you
get a lot of And I'm still amazed, And kudo's
in a tip of the cap to those guys up
there in Elmira and New York that did this, that
they were able to preserve this for so long. But
with this case here, you do have fresh material to
work with, the question is how well will you preserve it?
And David appears that they preserved it pretty dog one.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Well, brother, It's amazing that when everything was said and done, Joe,
this case came down to the genetics and the forensics
and identifying and once they were able to break down
the DNA. Joe, we have talked about how public sites
(35:24):
twenty three and meters right that these that people are
uploading their uploading your DNA. You're putting your whatever up
online to find out your ancestry.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Okay, Look, we've talked about this.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Joe, about how the government is not allowed to go
and dig into these private sites. However, when you submit
your sample to them, you can sign away that right
and allow them them being whoever you sent it to, to
allow the government to use it. You can actually allow that.
It's a choice. Well, in this case, young woman uploaded
(36:03):
her DNA to one of the ancestry sites and said
leave it open. Wow, she was hoping for a hit,
and Joe, it took eighteen years, but they got the hit.
It was in twenty twenty four they got the identification.
The remains were finally identified through the DNA analysis and
(36:25):
the genealogical research that was done after Austin's sister uploaded
DNA to ancestry site. And once they knew who she was,
then they were like, well, wait a minute, She's from
New York. But she had been living in Georgia. And
who was she living with. She was living with Angel
Thompson right now, Angel Thompson, and they were living together.
(36:53):
And I'm trying to remember the name of the town,
but it was in Georgia and it was a small town.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
But Joe.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
In two thousand and seven, when those remains were found
in unidentified, the name of Nicole continued on. Nicole Alston
continued on because Angel Thompson. She went so far as
to renew her driver's license. Joe Angel Thompson renewed Nicole
(37:22):
Alston's driver's license using Nicole's picture, but all of Thompson's
personal information using the name Angel Thompson. Nicole Alston. Angel
Thompson got food stamps, she got Section eight housing, social
Security benefits. All told, for a number of years, Angel
(37:45):
Thompson pretended to be stole the identity of the woman
Nicole Alston to the tune of over two hundred thousand
dollars in government benefits. And once they were able to
get the identity of the remain you know, done, they
were able to then track it to.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Thompson.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
And once they did, they being the investigators, they got
it before grand jury. And that's what you sent me,
was this eighty count indictment. It is pretty serious, Joe,
but you know what, there might be an eighty count indictment.
We still don't have the head, the hands, or the feet,
(38:27):
but investigators did get an identity because they didn't stop looking.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
They didn't and every investigation, and I will say this
until my dying day, every investigation always begins with identification.
And we can have we can have unidentified bodies out there,
but if you cannot find out who the person is,
you cannot go forward with an investigation trying to determine
(38:53):
who their associates are that may have knowledge of their
death or you know, in certain cases, may have caught
their death. And this is a perfect example of this.
It took them all these many years, but once they
were able through genetics to identify, to identify in Nicole's body,
it's at that point in time that the wheels went
(39:16):
into motion, they were able to identify that someone through
just a series of horrible, horrible events, robbed this woman
of who she was and has been living a lie
all these many years. Now, let me tell you this,
This accused has not been found guilty. Okay, this is
(39:40):
still in the court system, but I can tell you this,
brother Dave and I are going to keep an eye
on this case because it is absolutely super bizarre and
it's also a good learning tool. I think for us,
all we know, and this is what's important that as investigators,
there is always hope, There is always hope that at
some point in time, some peace will fall into place,
(40:02):
that some bit of data that we've overlooked will lead
us in the right direction. And you never know, you
never know, we might even wind up with the location
of the rest of her body and hopefully we'll find
out what her cause of death was. I'm Josephcott Morgan
and this is body back
Body Doubts with Joseph Scott More.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Some things in life are just absolutely tedious. I love that,
and I love that word. I absolutely love that word tedious.
It's such an all encompassing phrase. You know. It goes to,
you know, taking a lot of time to do something,
(00:26):
or the work that you're having to do is so
overwhelming just by sheer numbers. That boredom sets in those
sorts of things. And that happens a lot in investigations
because you've got so much data coming in that you're
trying to process it, and you're trying to, you know,
hang your proverbial, investigative and scientific hat on it. Sometimes
(00:50):
it's hard to really mold it into something. It's almost
like working with super wet clay. Today, I want to
talk about a case that is tedious for many reasons.
I think one of the elements of tedium that comes
along with this is time. Another element is confusion. And
(01:14):
I think finally this idea of tedium is demonstrated through
the fact that the perpetrator in this case has had
over eighty charges filed against her. Oh I forgot to
mention something. She killed her girlfriend and chopped her up
(01:38):
into little bits. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
bodybags now, David, I don't think I could be an
airline pilot. And this is other than the fact I've
got bad eyes and I'm listen. I will spend time.
I will literally spend time on utah on YouTube watching
(02:03):
people land and take off. I'm fascinated by it. You
know where they go into these different locations around the world.
You live through it vicariously, and these people are incredible
as far as I'm concerned, as far as technicians and
all that stuff, but it is so incredibly tedious. Everything
you have to do and check and you want them
(02:24):
to do it and check it. Trust me, as a passenger,
I do because of I don't know gravity, and so
I want that to happen. But you know, you see
what they do, and you know how that kind of
translates into into a safe landing or a successful landing.
When you have certain cases in forensics, it's kind of
(02:44):
like that, you know, what what boxes do you tick?
As the brit say what boxes do you tick? Have
you ticked all of the correct boxes? Are you paying
attention to every bit of detail? And the case we
have today it really caught my eye because it's so
involved in Oh my lord, it took so long to
come to a conclusion.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
On You know, Nicole Austin went missing in two thousand
and seven, Gone, just gone, and her mom didn't know
where she was, you know, her loved ones didn't know
where she was. But she's twenty four years old, she's
from New York City. And I was looking this over
(03:28):
because I kept trying to figure out what was really
going on. You talked about the tedious, and I thought
there was a time when I was researching this that
I went, wait a minute, Okay, we have a We
have Nicole Alston whose family knows she's gone, but nobody
else seems to know. And the reason is her girlfriend,
Angel Thompson, who was also twenty four at the time.
(03:51):
She's forty two now. Angel Thompson had been living her
life as Nicole Alston and Nicole Alston still existed on paper.
Nicole Alston was still getting food stamps, she was getting
Social Security benefits, she was getting Section eight housing, she
(04:15):
was getting a lot of stuff. Nicole Allston was so
I guess her family just thought, well, maybe she just.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Doesn't want to talk to us.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Or something.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
There wasn't a big search, you know. But in two
thousand and seven, the fire department was called in Troop County,
Georgia because there were these bags burning along a rural road.
Now I know you know Troup County, don't.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
You, Yes, I do, Hugians in particular.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, you tell me. Okay, where is that in relation
to Atlanta?
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah? People think when they think Georgia, unfortunately they think
Atlanta and Atlanta is not some total of all of Georgia.
Georgia is a big place. It's one of the largest
states east of the Mississippi. Matter of fact, fun fact,
in the words of Paul Blart, fun fact, the most
(05:08):
counties of any state east of the Mississippi. As a
matter of fact, tiny county, So lots and lots of them. Anyway,
I digress. So if you go south to southwest of
Atlanta along the eighty.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Five corridor, Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Like you're heading to Montgomery out of Atlanta. That's the
area that we're talking about, and it's you know, Hogansville
is probably well Atlanta traffic. Who can measure that? Yeah,
I'd say you're probably at least an hour hour and
a half with Atlanta traffic on a cod day to
make it to Atlanta or back up around the airport.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Yeah, okay, all right, Well then that gives us an
idea of where we are. And if you continued on
eighty five, you could end up in Montgomery, Alabama.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, yeah, you could in Auburn and all those other
places in between.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Well, these bags were found on fire. Fire department comes
out there, and of course, you know, you put out
a fire with then they start looking in the bags,
you know what's going on with these bags? And well
what they found. The fire department found a chopped up body. Yeah,
but but this chopped up body was missing some important
(06:18):
parts missing, the head, the feet, the hands, all missing.
So you've got parts of a body in two bags
that are now burned. And that's it, Joe, that's it.
And in two thousand and seven, I know that when
we look back around that eighteen years ago, we had
(06:39):
we'd come a long way with DNA, we'd come along
way with forensic testing and things, but not far enough.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
No, not as far as we have today. We can
put such a fine point on things today compared to
it was literally and I can't believe I'm saying this
about two thousand and seven. It was literally a different world, right,
It truly was. From a scientific perspective, moves at light speed.
My students at Jacksonville State. When I'm lecturing to them now, Dave,
(07:07):
I'll frame things like so old, I feel like I
ought to be sitting up on a mountain with a
long gray beard and birds living in my beard. I'll
say things like you're going to behold wonders in forensic
science that I could not even begin to imagine, you know,
moving on into the future, and just like back in
(07:27):
two thousand and seven, there are things back then that
I could not have visualized now in the world that
we exist in now. And so we make leaps like
that in all high end scientific endeavor we do, or
at least I think scientists and research sciences certainly hope
that we do. But in this particular case, yeah, you
had a lot, You had a lot to go on
(07:48):
as far as a body, though it was I don't
know how it was ordered. I could use particulated uh,
and it has suffered great heat relate trauma obviously post
mortem heat related artifact. But yet, what do you literally,
I always use this phrase, what are you going to
(08:09):
hang your hat on, because if you don't have a
database to go to, all you know is that you
can probably surmise depend upon the pieces you have, you
can surmise race. If you have a dark skinned individual,
you can take a shot at that, if you have
any bony elements that are left behind. There are certain
(08:31):
elements in our skeletal structure, like once you strip all
of the tissue off of which is hard to do
with a burn case. Unlike like if you have somebody
that just goes through standard decomposition. I say standard, right,
you know there're a standardized composition, but there is there
really is. If you have a body that's just laid
out on the ground and exposed to the elements, it's
(08:51):
a lot easier to do and they become skeletonized. It's
a lot easier to do aging and that sort of
thing on that.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
But now the same problem with not problem, but with
flies and things like that in a burned and burned
remains that you would have in non burned.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Yeah that interesting. Flies can take certain things away, but
they're not necessarily going to affect a skeletal remains. Now,
which could do I think and I know that you
could even with burn cases, you can still understand the
life cycle of the insects from an entomological standpoint that
(09:27):
are showing up, you know, because they're at a predictable rate.
We talk about the life cycle of insects showing up,
so that data would still be viable. However, what could
be compromised are say, for instance, you're talking about a
victim here that is twenty four years old, if you're
missing certain elements, like you think about bone fusion, Like
(09:52):
when we hit adulthood, our bones stop growing. Well, some
people hit it earlier, some people hit it later. And
if you're missing certain elements you think about I think
they're called the epiphus ill plates that you know, kind
of fuse together and at that point you're not going
to grow anymore. So if you're missing some of those elements,
that can kind of throw you off. And here's the
other thing in the initial the initial search in this case, David,
(10:13):
they don't have a head. Now that's problematic, and it's
problematic if you're trying to identify somebody. I think probably
the most striking thing for me is the teeth, because
teeth are something that they tell such a tale about
the person in their life. Most people don't think about
what their teeth or could literally be saying. Scientifically, we
(10:34):
look for things like wear patterns on teeth, like what
side it And I do this with my students as well.
I'll say, okay, everybody, close your eyes when I teach
my odentology section, close your eyes and take a tip
of your tongue and run it across the surface of
your teeth and try to determine what side of your
mouth do you favor when you chew? Well the lines
share people, they favor the right side because there will
(10:56):
be as much wear. Now, my teeth have a lot
more wear than saying eighteen year old freshman student. But
they get an idea, you know, like the canine is
no longer sharp, it's kind of worn down. Some people
grind their teeth, but not just that. But you're thinking
about the eruption of teeth. You know, even twelve year molars.
Have they erupted? Have they not erupted? You think about
(11:18):
wisdom teeth. Are the wisdom teeth still there? Because if
the wisdom teeth are still there all right, then I
can exclude everybody else in the world that has had
their wisdom teeth extracted, and conversely you can do the
same thing. You can also learn a lot about their
(11:38):
dentition as far as how well the body has been
or not the body, but how well they took care
of themselves in life. Do you have restorations, do you
have cavitated areas in the teeth? All those sorts of
things come into place. So you're missing ahead. That's one
of the biggest elements here. And isn't it interesting, Dave
that they took the hands off? What was your thought
(12:00):
about that when you saw that? I mean, I got
to ask you what was your first first inclination there?
Speaker 1 (12:06):
My thing was why the feet?
Speaker 3 (12:08):
I get the hands, and I get ahead from an
identification standpoint, But the feet. That's what got me because
again we've done that. You know, you cut somebody's hands off,
you don't have fingerprints? Take the head off?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Well, I think I think that people do that because
they they think back to babies having their feet printed.
You know that there's a card out there somewhere that's
going to have a footprint, and can you marry that up?
You know with a print. I've never seen any kind
of empirical study that you couldn't it should be unique.
(12:38):
But I got to tell you, person, I've never been
involved with the case that involved that type of foot printing. Okay, difference.
You know when you talk about crime scene and you're
talking about, well, there are footprints that are left behind
that could be shoe prints, it could be footprints, those
sorts of things. But as far as using a print,
and I know that it's happened, somebody's out there saying, well,
(13:00):
that's so and so he's working. I've worked these cases.
We've seen hundreds of these. Okay, God bless you go
in peace. I'm glad that you have, But in my experience,
I never have. And I think, but you have to
admit that people think about the footprint that they take
of a baby when they're little, and they're thinking that's
going to be an identifiable landmark that they can go
(13:22):
back to whoever this person was that's doing this. They're thinking, Okay,
if I decapitate them and if I take their hands
and their feet, it's going to diminish, it's going to
diminish the authorities of ability to get them identified. Because
you know why, because in the back of this perpetrator's mind,
(13:42):
what they were thinking is that those hands, those feet,
in that head, they now belong to me, and I'm
going to.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
Have this identity.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Imagine yourself as a guy that's working at the local well,
I guess you could. You don't have to be volunteer,
but you could be a guy that's sitting around the
firehouse in rural Troop County, Georgia, and you get a call,
got a call out, and this is the way the
call would probably run. They might even say, we've got
a brush fire on the side of the road, and
(14:28):
maybe it did catch some stuff on fire. And you know,
for firefighters, God bless them all. I love all the
people in the fire service. I think they're genuinely the
coolest people around. They roll out. Can you imagine being
the kid that's on the hose and you're sprinting this
thing down and all of a sudden, you see this.
Here's the problem. They're not very specific about the type
(14:50):
of bag. I'm assuming, assuming you know what they say
about assuming I'm assuming that it's a plastic bag, and
you've sprints this thing down, You've knocked the fire down,
and then just out of curiosity, you know that this
is where the fire started. Do you know how they
know that, Dave, because it's very logical. It's I love
(15:10):
talking about fire and people that work in I think
arson investigators are some of the most incredible forensic scientists,
unsung forensic scientists. By the way, out there wherever there's
the most damage. So, and it makes sense, doesn't it.
Wherever the fire has been burning the longest, that's going
to be your point of origin. And you can kind
of take that to the bank relative to is it
(15:31):
a structure or out in the field. Okay, So can
you imagine being this kid that kind of knocked this
fire down and he sees this big blob in the
middle of the road, he walks over there. He might
you know, he's got his firefighter gloves on, he's got
his big boots on, and he might just bump it
with his foot or maybe peel it away, and the
next thing you know, you're looking at a hunk of
human flesh. He imagine, what's surprised that would be out
(15:54):
there in rural rural Troop County and Dave, fire, according
to what we're seeing, was started literally on.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
The side of the road. Yeah, that tells a lot
about the perpetrator here. It does and.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
When I was first going over this, trying to find
out everything I could, and one thing that has hit me,
you've me talking about your students. You realize now that
a freshman coming out out of high school and going
to for your university would have been born in two
thousand and seven, two thousand and eight. Thank you for
(16:34):
I just thought i'd throw that out there because in
my head, I was thinking this is a long time ago.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
It's a short time ago. You know.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Well, as you're teaching this to your students, you're gonna
have some going in there before.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I was born.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Listen, let me tell you this one aside. I've got
students right now that are actually thinking former students that
are actually thinking, gosh, when can I retire?
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Wow? Bless your.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Well.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
All right, let's get forward on this one, because you
do have what kind of person okay, because they have
dumped somebody because you don't kill yourself, and I guess
I was trying to think, is there a possible way
you could hack yourself up and at the last minute,
like the match, die after you you know, this is
(17:22):
an obvious.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Death.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
The very the very best thing would be mutilation, abuse
of a corpse. You would have that if you were
to find somebody you didn't know on your property and
you were trying to get rid of them kind of thing,
which is so stupid. I mean, I'm just trying to
think of any way possible.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
It does happen. I mean, we've had cases where people
have panicked and they've had a body around, and so
they've tried to get rid of the body because they
don't want to be associated with. It doesn't necessarily mean
that they kill them. However, that does in fact happen.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
And that's kind of why we're being very careful with
the story in LA with D four v.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
D Burke.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
You're absolutely right, brother, And so as we move forward
in this one, though, it actually we come at it
from the ending, because as Joe you mentioned at the
very beginning, that we have had an indictment, so we
do know what has taken place, and we know who
is accused of doing this, and we know what transpired.
So we know our victim, Nicole Austin, she was twenty
(18:21):
four years old when she was hacked up into pieces,
her head, hands and feet removed, and her remains and
I mean that literally her remains were set on fire.
We don't know where the head, the hands, and the
feet are at this moment. I don't know if we
ever will, right, I would imagine the family would like
(18:43):
to know.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
And oh yeah, you know, you.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Would think if anything good could come out of this,
that the suspect here might say something. But to go
to this, you mentioned the fire guy showing up and
you know, put out the fire first, and you go
to kick the and you see a leg an arm,
I mean, you know, the human arm. The human leg
is going to look like nothing else, you know, and
(19:09):
it's robust.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
It's robust as well. It's it's a big, big piece
of anatomy that would be really hard, really hard to
kind of disguise or hide.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
You're not going to come business with somebody's dog.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's so very distinctive. And you know,
this is the I've heard some reports that have said
a bag, and I've heard other reports that say bags.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Yeah, bags. There were two bags, okay, yeah, according to
the police report.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
And you know, I'm thinking, well, if you've got a
couple of bags and you're doing this, so you've it
would stand a reason. Since this is along a roadside,
right this this means that the person wanted to put
as much distance between themselves and this event as possible.
(20:03):
I know that seems rather obvious, but just let me
feed this lot of logic to you. Here I was considering.
So you're going to go to the trouble of you know,
dismembering a body, you bag it up. Now we know
that other pieces are missing, so the assumption would be
(20:24):
that they are dispersed. Now what I'm hearing right now
is roughly thirteen pieces, all right, that they have found,
all right, So we don't know if that's concentrically contained
to this location or it's on kind of an outlied,
outlying area. But here's the weird thing. You go to
all this trouble to do this, and then you're going
to pull over on the side of the road. You're
(20:45):
going to have to use some kind of accelerant because
as you and I have studied, you know, for low
these many years now, you know that bodies don't burn
real well, they're not great fuel. So you have to
initiate this fire. So you're going to get out of
your car at an intersection, take these pieces out, place
(21:05):
them on the side of the road. In plane view,
of anybody and everybody, douse them with an accelerant, put
fire to it, get back in your car and head out.
Why would you do that? Why not? Why not tramp
off in the woods even ten yards or twenty yards
and do this and no one would be the wiser,
particularly in the moment. I just it kind of baffles me,
(21:29):
you know when I think about think about why why
this course was taken? And still to this day, we
do know who the victim is. But Dave, I got
to tell you, because the head's missing, we don't we
don't have a cause of death. We don't have death
in this case.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
So we know we've got body parts in a couple
of bags that are lit on fire, and the fire
department is called to come and put it out. We
know it's a rural area trip Downty Georgia. Now the
base that we know, Joe, you're going to get called
out there and uh, we're going to try to figure
out what happened. And you really have to figure out
(22:10):
on top of what happened, But who is this because
that could lead you to something. And yet if you
don't have a head, hands feet, and you've got what's
left is burned. Where are you going to start with
the identification process.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
The only thing you can do, Dave, I would think,
is well, you're going to Okay, here's how it would
break down. We're going to look for anything superficial that
we can identify. You know what, you know what my
first stop would be on this torso.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Or what.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, you're right on the money there, you score man.
I'm going to look for tattoos and I am going
to see if any of them marry up with any
particular style. And I'm also going to see if there
are initials attached to this in any way, anything that
is a specific identifier. I've had a number of cases,
(23:02):
and I know people have got these kind of tattoos
that are walking around out there where they've had someone
that they dearly loved and they have their dearly departed
state of death, you know, like tattooed on their arm
and I'll say I will always love you or things
like that, And you think that that's rather innocuous, But Dave,
that's a piece of information I would not have had previously.
(23:24):
I'm not saying that happened this case, but you're going
to go over every bit of this body from stem
to stern to try to pick up on that. Here's
the problem, because you're talking about subjecting this body to
incredible heat. I think folks would say, well, would it
be possible to find a tattoo on a burned surface?
(23:44):
My answer is yes, it would be. But this gets
tedious here because you have to literally scrape and peel
through that top burned layer so that you can get
down to the dermos. Now, it all depends on how
badly the dermist layer is earned not in every case,
or you're going to see tattoos completely burned away a
(24:05):
lot of it. Well, it's all depended upon the intensity
of the fire and how long that tissue was exposed
to fire as to whether or not this thing is
going to curl up and disappear and vanish. That would
be the first place. The other place I'm going to
look over the course of the body. Now they're saying
that we have a torso. Okay, that's what's being implied
(24:26):
at least no head, no hands, no feet. But if
I have a torso and I can surmise that this
is a female, guess where I'm going. I'm going to
the plumbing. At that point in time. I'm going to
see if there's a uterus, I'm going to see if
there's ovaries. I'm going to see if there's any evidence
that this individual has given birth at some point in time,
(24:46):
and there are examinations that we can do to make
that determination. And I want to do a deep dive
relative to that because those are specific identifiers, any kind
of last augmentation on the body, breast, implants, anything like that.
And also here's the other thing talking about surgeries. You know,
(25:09):
fire is fire, but what can be resisted by fire
or stainless steel, pins, plates, surgical steel, all that stuff.
So this gets really complex. The first thing you have
to do is take the remains that you have, and
they would have done this any way in any kind
of fire death. They're going to thoroughly X ray this body,
and if there's anything on that X ray, that radiograph
(25:31):
that is radio opaque, any kind of metallic bit that's there,
it's going to stand out, and you want to target
that area. You have to be very specific because sometimes
X rays can be deceiving. Okay, because when you have
fire remains, it's amazing, Dave. You'll see pins, buttons, zippers,
(25:53):
all kinds of things will appear on the x ray
because the person might still be clothed or partially closed
clothes are not burned away. I've found zippers on the
backs of people when you shoot the X ray because
you couldn't really orient the thing, you didn't really know
what you were looking at. All kinds of things pop up.
(26:13):
We've even found spent projectiles in burned remains, and that's
something that does happen. I've found broken knife tips in
burned remains. That's why you always do an X ray first,
so that you can kind of catalog the stuff as
you're walking your way through it. But they would have
had a monumental task on their hand, and if this
(26:34):
was in Troup County, Georgia, her remains would not have
gone to the Troop County corner. They don't have a
corner that would do an autopsy. Her remains would be
transferred almost an hour and forty five minute drive over
to GBI headquarters where they have the State Medical Examiner's
office there. So you're not going to have like an
(26:55):
EMMY investigator that's out there. You might have a GBI
agent that'll show up. You'll have the corner that's there.
They're going to take a look and then they're just
going to load this into the back of the van
and they're going to take it out to GBI headquarters
and do the examination out there. Dave, I was reading
(27:23):
in an article about this case, and I got to
tell you it's I hate to hear this term, but
in the in the article. In the article, and I'll
give credit to the article, it was it was written
and it's posted on Long Crime Network website. They refer
(27:44):
to this victim, uh, to this poor woman that lost
her life, refer to her as a cash cow. When
you begin to think about what has happened with this woman,
the end that she met, isn't that it's so dehumanizing
(28:07):
to think that. It's not that the article is necessarily inaccurate,
it's just the fact that that's what this poor victim
had become, Dave yea cash Just imagine that your family
thinks that you're alive out there somewhere, but they've never
made any effort to contact you or reach out. Maybe
they had, but it's kind of sounding thin to say
(28:30):
the least. They just think that you're out there, still
existing in the ether somewhere and you're not. You've been gone,
You've been gone for decades now, you just poof vanish
and then in death you refer to as a cash cow.
How horrible is.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
That, you know the I'm glad you brought that up, Okay,
because I think far too often the world of crime
coverage today loses some of its humanity and we forget
that we're dealing with people like Okay, cash cow might
be an appropriate term if you're discussing it with others
(29:07):
in the crime world. But if you're the mother, grandmother
of the victim who didn't know, you know, what it
be out, what became of their daughter, granddaughter, you know,
to see that would be shocking, It would be upsetting
and more than anything else, you don't know. They might
have been burning a candle every night for the last
eighteen years, wondering when are we going to hear from Nicole?
(29:29):
Why have we not heard from Nicole? So all that
aside Nicole Alston was murdered. I'm gonna take that back,
because I don't know that she was murdered, Joe. I
don't know that. I do know that her body was
dismembered and burned, and what we have learned now. And
(29:49):
this is why I really get down to the DNA
of this Joe, because I can tell you after the fact. Once,
once the investigation was able, because they couldn't identify the remains,
didn't know who it was. They did not, I say
they It isn't like we found the remains on the
side of the road. We called, hey, is anybody missing?
Somebody without it? You know, they actually did a real
(30:13):
investigative dive, tried to figure out what was going on here,
and couldn't. They did not have the they didn't have
what they needed to actually identify the person. Without being
able to identify who it is, then you don't even
know where to start with the investigation. It starts with
knowing who's dead. And so they worked on it hit
(30:37):
a dead end. The case went cold. But as many
of the cases that we have worked on over the
last four hundred and ninety nine episodes or so, DNA
genetic genealogy, the forensics actually identified the remains without hands,
(31:00):
without feet, without a head. I'm thinking the hair that
was gone was there any because we had a story,
you know, we had a case the other day where
we were talking about hair three decades old hair was
an identifier, and here we don't have a head. I mean,
this is really something I'm thinking, how in the world
where do you start to identify?
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Well, the thing the cool thing about this day, if
you I'm not being disrespectfuble, I'm just saying from a
scientific standpoint one of the things that this is not
like we have a body that's been moldering in the woods, okay,
and we're down the skeletal remains and we don't know
if we're going to be able to retrieve anything. You
know that fire sometimes helps, do you know that? And
(31:44):
the reason learned that from you?
Speaker 1 (31:46):
I had no idea. I'm not kiding Joe.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
I used to think, like, we did episodes of this
where somebody lit a fire in the house to cover
up a crime.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
I thought, sounds like a great idea, you know.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
And I remember one episode we did and you it
was a long episode because I couldn't quit listening to you.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
I was like, dude, what what do.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
You mean They set the fire to get rid of everything,
and all they did was like freeze it in time.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, you really do, because okay, think of it this
way if you uh, and this is really horrible to
think about. But just to understand if you're think about
it like a well, I won't use that example that
really will put people back. But just think about something
where you have the external area is burned, okay, and
(32:32):
it's showing showing signs of being burned. We're talking about charring.
We're talking about even the skin becoming so dehydrated that
it crisp up and it's curled, that sort of thing.
I guess what the interior. The interior to a great
degree remains intact. So this is a fresh dead person day.
(32:52):
So when they go in to examine her body, one
of the things they would have done is to have
collected see how can I say this? They would have
collected deep muscle tissue that they could have gone into bone,
(33:12):
They could have they probably could have pulled out some
blood in here, because it's all still going to be
there and they're going to have this, They're going to
have this hanging in the background. Okay, so they're going
to hold onto this biological sample. Now they did know.
We did know back during that period of time that
we could hang on to things and they would have
(33:35):
future utility. Did you know that at every autopsy we
do something. It's called a blood card and there's like
a little it looks like a felt car. It's real tiny.
It's about the size of a microscopic slide. Okay. And
you take just a droplet of blood and you merely
hold the hold the dropper above it and one little
(33:59):
drop and it goes down into the circle that's right there,
and you let it dry and you have that forever
and ever, amen, and it deserves it. Yeah, So you
can do that. They can retain tissue and this sort
of thing. So the fact that this is a fresh
dead remain, that's where DNA comes into play. Remember our
little girl up in Mary Simpson Simpson, Oh yeah, in
(34:21):
New York, in New York, dude. They they they had
held onto her dress. They and they got that from
seminal seminal her. The identity of the deceit of the perpetrator.
They got his from a seminal sample off of her dress.
(34:43):
That's not robust. Over that long period of time, you
get a lot of And I'm still amazed, And kudo's
in a tip of the cap to those guys up
there in Elmira and New York that did this, that
they were able to preserve this for so long. But
with this case here, you do have fresh material to
work with, the question is how well will you preserve it?
And David appears that they preserved it pretty dog one.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Well, brother, It's amazing that when everything was said and done, Joe,
this case came down to the genetics and the forensics
and identifying and once they were able to break down
the DNA. Joe, we have talked about how public sites
(35:24):
twenty three and meters right that these that people are
uploading their uploading your DNA. You're putting your whatever up
online to find out your ancestry.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Okay, Look, we've talked about this.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Joe, about how the government is not allowed to go
and dig into these private sites. However, when you submit
your sample to them, you can sign away that right
and allow them them being whoever you sent it to, to
allow the government to use it. You can actually allow that.
It's a choice. Well, in this case, young woman uploaded
(36:03):
her DNA to one of the ancestry sites and said
leave it open. Wow, she was hoping for a hit,
and Joe, it took eighteen years, but they got the hit.
It was in twenty twenty four they got the identification.
The remains were finally identified through the DNA analysis and
(36:25):
the genealogical research that was done after Austin's sister uploaded
DNA to ancestry site. And once they knew who she was,
then they were like, well, wait a minute, She's from
New York. But she had been living in Georgia. And
who was she living with. She was living with Angel
Thompson right now, Angel Thompson, and they were living together.
(36:53):
And I'm trying to remember the name of the town,
but it was in Georgia and it was a small town.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
But Joe.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
In two thousand and seven, when those remains were found
in unidentified, the name of Nicole continued on. Nicole Alston
continued on because Angel Thompson. She went so far as
to renew her driver's license. Joe Angel Thompson renewed Nicole
(37:22):
Alston's driver's license using Nicole's picture, but all of Thompson's
personal information using the name Angel Thompson. Nicole Alston. Angel
Thompson got food stamps, she got Section eight housing, social
Security benefits. All told, for a number of years, Angel
(37:45):
Thompson pretended to be stole the identity of the woman
Nicole Alston to the tune of over two hundred thousand
dollars in government benefits. And once they were able to
get the identity of the remain you know, done, they
were able to then track it to.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Thompson.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
And once they did, they being the investigators, they got
it before grand jury. And that's what you sent me,
was this eighty count indictment. It is pretty serious, Joe,
but you know what, there might be an eighty count indictment.
We still don't have the head, the hands, or the feet,
(38:27):
but investigators did get an identity because they didn't stop looking.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
They didn't and every investigation, and I will say this
until my dying day, every investigation always begins with identification.
And we can have we can have unidentified bodies out there,
but if you cannot find out who the person is,
you cannot go forward with an investigation trying to determine
(38:53):
who their associates are that may have knowledge of their
death or you know, in certain cases, may have caught
their death. And this is a perfect example of this.
It took them all these many years, but once they
were able through genetics to identify, to identify in Nicole's body,
it's at that point in time that the wheels went
(39:16):
into motion, they were able to identify that someone through
just a series of horrible, horrible events, robbed this woman
of who she was and has been living a lie
all these many years. Now, let me tell you this,
This accused has not been found guilty. Okay, this is
(39:40):
still in the court system, but I can tell you this,
brother Dave and I are going to keep an eye
on this case because it is absolutely super bizarre and
it's also a good learning tool. I think for us,
all we know, and this is what's important that as investigators,
there is always hope, There is always hope that at
some point in time, some peace will fall into place,
(40:02):
that some bit of data that we've overlooked will lead
us in the right direction. And you never know, you
never know, we might even wind up with the location
of the rest of her body and hopefully we'll find
out what her cause of death was. I'm Josephcott Morgan
and this is body back
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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